In the podcast, we talk about a wide range of issues relating to school choice as outlined below. The time location of each broad topic within the audio podcast is mentioned below, for those who may want to jump to a specific point in the podcast.

00.03.00 - Explaining school choice to the layman.

00:06:50 - What would a parent need to do to benefit from school choice?

00:09:55 - What are the policy changes that would be required to implement school choice?

00:12:30 - On the scarcity of schools and difficulty in finding land for new schools especially in urban areas.

00:14:43 On the incentives for setting up new schools

00:17.39 On the freedom for schools to pick or choose the students they want to admit, social stratification in schools and fostering social mixing

00:27:04 On how to help parents make informed choices when selecting schools for their children

00:33:39 On dealing with switching costs for changing schools and the long time it takes to get feedback on the value added by a school.

00:36:42 Different school choice models

00:42:15 - The Charter School Model and its Indian variant

00:43:50 How has School Choice worked in other countries?

00:47:56 The prospects of implementing school choice in India and the receptivity for the idea of school choice.

00:54:52 On the role of grassroots political demand for improving education in India

Rs 750 (US$ 15) per person for NGO leaders, research scholars and school principals

Free registration for students

Registration closes on 12 Dec 2011.

Registration fee of Rs 5,000 (US$ 100) per person is applicable after December 12th

This is the third annual conference. Check out the proceedings of the 2010 and the 2009 conferences. I attended the earlier conferences and I will be attending this year too. I had written up a post in 2009 on the 2009 conference based on my notes. The past conferences have been highly informative and insightful and based on the speaker list, this year's conference promises to be so too.

Anil Swarup, the Director General, (Labour Welfare) in the Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India, who has been driving the RSBY project and Prof. Sugata Mitra of Hole-in-the-Wall fame are amongst the speakers.

January 31, 2011

Here is the first of four ideas that I talked about in my TED Talk titled Education for All - More of the Same or Something Different? on December 13th, 2010 at TEDx Kumaun

The first idea, a policy innovation, is to take a leaf out of the Government's own RSBY Project and replicate it to provide a quality education for every single child in the country.

A little over three years ago, the Government of India took up an extremely ambitious large scale challenge. The Govt wanted to provide free health care to all Below Poverty Line (BPL) persons across India, about 250-300 million of them, and launched the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) in October 2007.

How does the RSBY work?

The RSBY is a National Health Insurance Scheme run by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. The Central Government funds 75% of the scheme and the State Governments fund the balance 25%. The State Governments are responsible for implementation.

The Government pays an annual premium of about 400-600 rupees per household to an insurance company, which ensures healthcare and hospitalization cover up to 30,000 rupees per family per year. The RSBY scheme covers five members in each familiy including the head of the household, the spouse and upto three dependents.The insurance covers most diseases requiring hospitalisation. Pre-existing conditions are also covered from day one, with no age limit. Out-patient consultation is free, but the cost of out-patient health care will have to be borne by the beneficiaries themselves. Each BPL beneficiary is required to pay a nominal amount of Rs. 30 per year to cover administrative costs.

The RSBY is a cashless, paperless scheme and comes with a biometric smart card for each beneficiary, containing their fingerprints and photographs. Healthcare is available to the beneficiaries at any of over 5,000 empanelled private hospitals and over 2,000 empanelled Government hospitals across India. The BPL beneficiaries are free to go to any empanelled hospital of their choice anywhere in India based their own priorities of quality, accessibility, convenience or whatever else matters to them. More hospitals continue to be empanelled and these hospitals are required to meet a basic set of guidelines to become empanelled hospitals.

The Government's healthcare strategy

With a clearly defined goal of providing free health care for every single BPL family in a timebound manner, the Government did not think of setting up and running hospitals in every single district or block across the country. If the Government had decided to set up new hospitals across India, a huge amount of capital expenditure would have been needed for setting up the hospitals, besides hiring all the doctors, nurses and other supporting staff. There would have to be an annual budget allocated to run all these hospitals and the responsibility of administering and managing these hospitals would have fallen on the Government. All this would have taken time and by the time the infrastructure was built and made operational, many people would have been denied much needed healthcare for a couple of decades.

The Government wisely chose to focus on outcomes rather than inputs. It took on the responsibility of funding the health care for all BPL families, but chose not to provide the healthcare all by itself. By paying an insurance premium per person to an insurance company, which itself may be either a Government owned or a private Insurance Company, the Government made the insurance companies responsible and accountable for the administration and delivery of health care. These insurance companies bid for the RSBY contracts for every single district across the country. Different companies win the bids for different district and will be responsible for administering the RSBY at the ground level. Only one insurance company is given the contract for an entire district.

The insurance companies in turn work with both Government and Private Hospitals which will ultimately provide the health care to the BPL beneficiaries. The investments in setting up the hospitals will all be incurred by the private sector and the Government may also choose to set up a few hospitals in regions where the private sector doesn't venture quickly enough. The RSBY scheme has put purchasing power in the hands of the BPL families and private entities will respond to that by setting up new hospitals in areas with large number of BPL families to meet their healthcare needs. [Aside: A rural healthcare startup recently announced plans of setting up hospitals that will come up at the block level in rural areas to provide healthcare to BPL families under the RSBY.]

The progress in RSBY so far

22.7 million families have already been covered in just over 3 years time. That is a truly amazing achievement in terms of scale, cost and timelines. Encouraged by the progress, the Government is now considering extending this scheme beyond the BPL families to cover many more persons.

Doing an RSBY in Elementary Education

We need an RSBY kind of approach if we are to provide a quality education for every single child in the country in a time-bound manner. Imagine what can be achieved by replicating this model in Education. There is a simple equivalence between the RSBY model and an Education model.

Healthcare – RSBY Model

Elementary Education

Costs are shared by the Centre and the States, with the States being soley responsible for implementation.

Costs are shared by the Centre and the States, with the States being soley responsible for implementation.

The Government funds

healthcare for all BPL families and refrains from building and managing hundreds of new hospitals.

The Government funds

education for every single child and refrains from building and managing thousands of new schools.

The Government lays down

quality guidelines and regulations for the hospitals that want to get empanelled to provide healthcare to the BPL families.

The Government lays down

quality guidelines, standards and regulations for the schools that want to get empanelled to provide education to children in the country.

With purchasing power in the hands of the BPL families,

private investors will respond to the demand for healthcare and set up and run hospitals all across the country.

With purchasing power in the hands of the parents (of all the children)

private investors will respond to the demand for quality education and set up and run schools all across the country.

BPL families can choose to go to

any of the empanelled hospitals including both Government and Private Hospitals.

Parents can choose to send their child to

any of the empanelled schools including both Government and Private Schools.

The Government pays

premium to the Insurance Company who in turn pay the hospitals,

to cover the costs of healthcare provided.

The Government pays

the school fees for children enrolled in the empanelled schools,

to cover the costs of providing education.

If the Ministry of Labour & Employment can make a huge impact with the RSBY, there is no reason why the Ministry of Human Resource Development can't take a leaf out of the RSBY and come up with a similar project to help us reach out to over 200 million children and ensure every one of them gets a quality Education within 10 years.

I will describe the other three ideas covered in my TED Talk in subsequent posts.

September 29, 2010

This bit about the situation in America from a review of the documentary in New York Magazine drives home a harsh reality that is far more stark in the Indian context.

A real revolution in education will require a more foundational change-one that addresses the way in which the nation goes about turning people into teachers in the first place.

The ridiculousness of how we do it now is a bugbear of Geoff Canada's. "We say to these young people, 'We're going to make a deal with you,' " he explains. " 'We are not going to pay you a lot of money, but we are going to give you a lot of time off. You'll always get home before dark. You won't work weekends, and you'll have every summer off.' It's a terrible message we're sending that these perks come with their job. What kind of people does that attract to the profession?"

The answer to Canada's question is distressing and depressing. Whereas the best public-school systems in the world-Finland, Singapore, South Korea-recruit all of their teachers from the top third or better of their college graduates, in America the majority come from the bottom two-thirds, with just 14 percent of those entering teaching each year in high-needs schools coming from the upper third. And the numbers may be getting worse. According to a recent survey conducted by McKinsey, a meager 9 percent of top-third graduates have any interest in teaching whatsoever.

I think the corresponding numbers in India may be far worse. Much food for thought for us on how to address the challenges in India.

December 25, 2009

Private Schools and the Poor: Implementing the 25% in Section 12 of RTE (Right to Education Act 2009) was the focus of the first session. Provided below is a (paraphrased) summary of what each speaker had to say.

Sam Carlson, Lead Education Specialist for the World Bank in India, spoke about the RTE Bill and its implications. A copy of Sam Carlson's presentation is available at the conference web site.

The RTE Bill was passed by Parliament in August 2009, but has not yet been published in the Gazette. It will come into effect only after being published in the Gazette. The RTE Act Rules are being drafted and only after they are ready can it be published. The target date for that seems to be a rolling 3-4 months at any time, whenever you talk to anyone in the Ministry.

The RTE Bill is the first legislation in the world that puts the responsibility of providing elementary education and ensuring enrollment, attendance and completion on the Government. It is the parents' responsibility to send the children to schools in tje U.S. ad other countries. More importantly, this is a justiciable legislation, which means the Government can be taken to court if it does not ensure education is provided to all children.

If the RTE ACT is fully implemented (a big IF), it will be the largest education sector Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the world.

Private Unaided schools will have to admit in Class I, a minimum of 25% of their capacity, students from disadvantaged sections with the Government compensating the schools for the 25%. It remains to be seen how the leading private unaided schools will deal with providing the 25% seats to disadvantaged children.

The implementation of the RTE bill will result in a huge operational research opportunity in terms of the process for selecting the children who will be admitted in each school under the 25% quota, through a randomised lottery.

Interestingly, the responsibility of monitoring the implementation of the RTE Act is not with the Government, but has been assigned to the National Council for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) - an autonomous body set up in March 2007. The NCPCR doesn't have much experience in monitoring something on the scale of the implementation of the RTE Act and they will need to learn as they go along.

There are a lot of regulations imposed on schools by the RTE Act. Schools will have to adhere to specified student-teacher ratios, provide a minimum level of infrastructure, a minimum number of working hours per week and working days per year and so on. All unrecognised private schools must obtain recognition once the Act comes into effect to continue to function after the Act comes into force. If schools don't obtain recognition, they will have to pay a fine of Rs. 1 lakh plus Rs. 10,000 per day. But at the end of it all, one can't legislate teacher effort!

The RTE legislation is very progressive, but the devil is in the details and we need to wait for the rules for implementation that are being drafted.

The private sector has a crucial role to play. Public Private Parternships can leverage the incentive-based drive of the private sector to further public policy objectives (educational outcomes in the case of the RTE).

In the context of the RTE, there are PPP opportunities in a wide range of areas:

Educational services for the state-funded students (25% under RTE) in private schools

The World Bank has allocated US$ 300,000 for monitoring and evaluation of the RTE Act and to help the NCPCR and MHRD in implementing the RTE Act.

Amit Kaushik, a former Director in MHRD who was instrumental in drafting the RTE Bill and the development and implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and currently CEO of Shri Educare Limited (part of the SRF group), spoke on the RTE Bill and its challenges. A copy of Amit Kaushik's presentation is available at the conference web site.

At the time of the Constituent Assembly debates, there was opposition to universal adult franchise since most people were illiterate. Article 45 was introduced as a compromise: "The State shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years." It was the only Directive Principle of State Policy that had a specified time frame for implementation.

The RTE Bill was passed in 2009. Within three years from the date of publishing of the RTE bill in the Gazette, the government will have to ensure that enough schools are established in each neighbourhood to provide education to all. There are various responsibilities for the Central Government, the local governments (maintain records of children upto the age of 14 years, ensure admission of children with migrant families, monitor functioning of schools within their jurisdiction) and the schools (at least 25% of seats).

Likely challenges

Definition of neighbourhood and identification of "disadvantaged groups" and "weaker sections".

Monitoring utilisation of the 25% quota in private schools

Integrating disadvantaged children in upper-end private schools

Expenses over and above tuition fees

Preparing teachers to deal with diverse children

Status of unrecognised private schools

Ensuring quality and learning outcomes

It is unclear if the Private Schools can do a better job than State-run Schools. To quote a study by Educational Initiatives comparing Private and State-run schools,

"...I did find that any lead that private schools show in their learning outcomes over government schools can be completely explained away by...: (1) students socio-economic background, (2) students initial levels, (3) rote/procedural nature of learning tested. In other words, if you control for factor 1, look for improvements between say grade 3 and grade 7 (to nullify any initial advantage) and the test is not rote/testing procedural knowledge only, I do not believe private schools show any advantage over government schools."

ASER 2009 also points to the same thing.

About 7%-9% of schools in the country (around 75,000 schools) are private unaided schools, but they account for 20%-30% of enrollment in the country.

Everywhere else in the world, universal elementary education has been achived only through government schools. So the Government needs to improve its schools rather than letting private schools do more.

PPP in education is possible, but it must be done under the overall supervision of the Government.

The evidence on the effectiveness of the voucher mode is mixed.

Amit Kaushik mentioned that he and Parth Shah of the Centre for Civil Society (had differed publicly in the past on the role of public and private schools in ensuring education for all) and was happy that Parth Shah (the organiser of the conference) had invited him to the conference despite their disagreements.

I later asked Sridhar Rajagopalan, the CEO of Educational Initiatives (who was also present at the conference) about his studies on comparing the quality effect of private and public schools that Amit Kaushik referred to during his talk. Sridhar said that the studies were still going on and are not yet as conclusive as it seemed from Amit's presentation and we should wait before arriving at any conclusion.

Karthik Muralidharan, Assistant Professor in the economics department at the University of California, San Diego, spoke on the issue of the State vs the Market in the delivery of education and its implications for the RTE Bill. A copy of Karthik Muralidharan's presentation is available at the conference web site.

The returns to education come from the quality of education and not the quantity or the number of years of schooling.

Teacher accountability is a key issue. About 90% of spending goes to teachers' salaries and studies have shown that more spending has least effectiveness in the poorest places. The salary levels have nothing to do with reducing teacher absenteeism. In fact teachers are more likely to be absent with higher salaries. Accountability is a big issue, especially when teachers can't be fired for absenteeism.

50% of children in urban India go to private schools. There are more children in private schools in India than in Chile which has a national state-funded voucher program. These private schools are low fee "budget" private schools and not the fancy exclusive private schools. While Teacher salaries in these schools are low, the pupil teacher ratio is higher since these schools hire more teachers and are more responsive and accountable to parents. Students from these schools do better than students from state schools.

The jury is out on the value added by a private school when compared to a government school. Children in private schools are better at the Class III-IV level, since they have usually had two extra years in Kindergarten, when compared to children in government schools who join directly in Class I.

But one should look not just at the difference in quality between private and public schools, but also at the cost-effectivness. whether the same or better results have been achieved at lower costs in private schools or in government schools.

The salary levels of teachers in rural public schools can be as high as 5-10 times that of the salaries of teachers in rural private schools. The highest salaries in rural private schools are less than the lowest salaries in the rural public schools.

The demand for private schools is driven by the failure of public schools and not by the the demand by the elite.

The reason for this lies in the Exit vs Voice dilemma. The market are held accountable by Exit whereas the State can be held accountable only by Voice. Schools combine elements of Exit (can move from state-run schools to private schools) and Voice (community control and collective action).

The credibility of the Exit option impacts the Voice option. Improving the Exit option strengthens the Voice option. The question before us is - should we strengthen Exit, or Voice, or both?

Currently, the richer parents have the option of Exit to a better school, but the poorer parents don't have that option. Poorer parents are also the ones with the least political Voice and so they are doubly handicapped in terms of both Exit as well as Voice to improve the quality of public schools. The Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) don't seem to have an effect on reducing teacher absence in public schools. This could also be a collective action problem. Voice is further weakened in the face of the Exit of the Elite from public schools.

This issue of the poor not having Voice or Exit options can be solved by putting purchasing power behind the poor and then letting the markets respond to the demand. This would provide the poor with both Exit and Voice options. This can be implemented through Vouchers given to parents.

Reservations of 25% or more of seats in schools (through the RTE) could be prone to capture by certain sections of society, whereas vouchers for all will benefit the entire community.

There are concerns about vouchers, which need to be discussed and addressed. Will private schools self-select and continue to remain elite by excluding disadvantaged children even if they have vouchers? Can illiterate parents make informed choices on which schools to go to? Could there be a balkanisation along religious/ethnic lines? Will we in effect be giving up on the public system and letting the government abdicate its responsibility of educating all children?

The case for vouchers shouldn't be looked at as a choice of public vs private, but as a means of increasing competition to improve both public and private schools and ensuring equity and social justice by providing the disadvantaged with choices that today are available only to the well-off.

Many studies are required on the efficacy of voucher programs, the response of private schools etc.. and the 25% provision in the RTE Act will provide an opportunity for many such studies. A study is currently being conducted in collaboration with the Azim Premji Foundation in Andhra Pradesh.

Anders Hultin was a former political adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Schools from 1991-1994. In 1999, he co-founded the private school chain, Kunskapsskolan and was Chief Executive of this company for eight years during which time the company became the largest provider of secondary education in Scandinavia operating thirty-two schools with more than 10,000 students. He is currently CEO of GEMS Education UK. He spoke on the Swedish experience with vouchers. A copy of Anders Hultin's presentation is available at the conference web site.

Sweden is today a country with a population of 9 million and 4000 schools. There were three milestones in education in Sweden

The first was in the mid 1800s - compulsory state-funded elementary education was provided for all

The next was in the mid 1900s - compulsory state-funded education was extended to the secondary level.

The last was in 1992 - the introduction of the voucher model

The introduction of the voucher model was part of the manifesto of the winning political party and was largely regarded as symbolic. But the government was surprised by the very high number of applications to start new private schools, at a time when 99% of all schools were State schools. Anyone who met certain criteria was given the license to run private schools.

The State agreed to pay the same money to private schools that they were paying to the State schools. This amounted to about US$ 7,500 per year. No voucher top-up was allowed - (i.e) private schools were not allowed to collect any more money from the students directly. The private schools had to compete with State schools with equal resources.

From 80 private schools in 1992, there are over 1,100 private schools in Sweden today.

This provides parents a choice forces school operators to respond to the competition and perform better and serve the needs of the parents and society.

There is freedom for private school operators, but with regulation. Information on school operator performance should go to parents. Access to good information can solve the problem of information asymmetry.

While a lot is said about Sweden's voucher model, there is one important point - 75% of all private schools in Sweden are for-profit schools. Without the profit-element there would not have been so many private schools. Most of them would have remained small and largely been religiously oriented. The voucher model would not have existed without the acceptance of for-profit schools.

Take the Carlsson School in Stockholm, fore example. It is a very good private school run by a non-profit charitable trust for over a 100 years. They have a seven year waiting list to get in to the school - you even need to time the birth date of your child correctly and apply on the date of birth! The longer the waiting list, the more reputed the school. Since the school is run by a non-profit trust, there is no incentive for them to set up any more schools. If they had a profit incentive, they would have certainly been striving for growth and would have set up many more schools.

What makes Carlsson School such a good school? It is not the buildings, but the deep understanding of what it takes to run a good school and how to transfer this culture and knowledge from one generation of teachers to another. This is the Intellecutal Property of the School. Had it been a for-profit school, there would have been an incentive and motivation for it to replicate the success of its one school to serve the huge waiting list of children needing education. This would be hugely valuable to society in two ways. One by expanding the supply of high quality schooling. The other by forcing poor quality school operators (both state-run and private schools) who are currently doing an injustice to the lives of so many children, to drastically improve their quality or wind up.

The bottom line for any succesful voucher system is the presence of the for-profit motive. Without that the number of good quality private schools will be limited and will cater only to a small elite.

Prof. R. Govinda, Vice Chancellor of NUEPA, representing the Government point of view chaired the session. He spoke at the end and summed up the first session and responding to some of the comments of the other speakers

We need public spaces in our society and schools are one such public space. We should not let schools become private spaces.

The Government is working on the the draft rules for the RTE Act and is taking its time to ensure that it is well thought through and covers all the various aspects and anticipates all the potential pitfalls. The rules should be published soon.

Unrecognised schools will not be closed down suddenly. They will all be given time and and the opportunity to improve their infrastructure and rise up to meet the requirements of recognition. So there is no need to fear that all the recognised schools will vanish one day leaving a large number of students in the lurch. The Government would not want that to happen.

The RTE Bill is a contract between the State and the School and not the State and the Individual, like in the voucher model. The Government is only agreeing to meet the cost of educating a child if it goes to a State School. If the child goes to a private school, it will not be reimbursed any amount.

The second session was on Graded Recognition System: Positive Regulation and the third session was on Strengthening Government Schools. I will summarise these session too in future posts.